


Temptation (The Iambic Remix)

by Isis



Category: due South
Genre: Community: remixthedrabble, M/M, Poetry, Remix, Sonnets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-10
Updated: 2008-04-10
Packaged: 2019-06-12 11:31:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15338952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isis/pseuds/Isis
Summary: The bracelet beckons, and Fraser falls.





	Temptation (The Iambic Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Evidence](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/398610) by Malnpudl. 



> Written for Remix the Drabble round 4. This particular form is known as an Onegin stanza or Pushkin sonnet. It is not, alas, quite a drabble.

Shiny beads of silver slide on Ray’s wrist  
Gleaming and glittering against golden skin  
Fraser gulps, slowly breathes, fights to resist  
His eyes turn to Ray; his thoughts turn to sin.  
Ray’s vanilla ice cream drips in the sun  
Sticky streaks slide down, and Fraser is undone  
He mustn’t—he shouldn’t—but oh, how he desires  
To melt Ray’s composure in his own banked fires  
The bracelet beckons; his mouth goes dry  
His heart beats quicker, louder, stronger  
He can’t hold out a moment longer—  
Grasping Ray’s arm, he gasps out a sigh,  
He licks, he sucks, his yearning drinks its fill  
The ice cream is sweet, but Ray is sweeter still.

**Author's Note:**

> (Original endnote copied from LJ)
> 
> I wrote a sonnet! Which drove me nuts, but I'm mostly happy with it. There was no way I could possibly get the whole plot of Mal's story in here. So I ditched the whole aspect of the ice cream being evidence, of Fraser holding back, of Ray admitting his sensual pleasure in the way his bracelet slides on his skin (mmm) and just went for the central image that stuck in my mind, the image I think of when I think of her story: Fraser licking melted ice cream from Ray's wrist, his tongue flicking around the beads of the bracelet. YUM, right? And that's what I made into a poem.
> 
> I love sonnets. In particular, I love what is called the Pushkin (or Onegin) sonnet, which is iambic tetrameter with the somewhat odd rhyme scheme aBaBccDDeFFeGG, where lower-case letters represent feminine rhymes (like stronger/longer) and upper-case represent masculine rhymes (like skin/sin). It's cool because each quatrain has a different pattern of rhymes. Um, I didn't hold strictly to this verse form, because tetrameter's kind of sing-songy and I wanted the extra syllables of pentameter, and I kind of punted on the masculine/feminine rhymes because I got stuck. But I still adore this rhyme scheme. And although one of its advantages for story-telling (it was devised for Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and Vikram Seth used it for his novel Golden Gate (which I liked except I thought the ending sucked)) is that it can be parsed in a variety of ways, I kept the classical structure of the quatrains setting a problem, describing it more fully, a thematic turn, and then a summary couplet.
> 
> In summary, this was a pain in the ass to write, and also incredibly fun to write. It made me want to run a "remixthesonnet" fest in which participants must remix their stories into sonnets. Okay, maybe not. :-)


End file.
